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My father passed away four years ago, on June 18. It was the day that Father's Day fell on that year. My father-in-law, Jen's dad, passed away 11 years ago on June 20th, on that respective year. It's a strange cosmic sign but not uncommon for our relationship where many signs and seeming coincidences are too numerous to be pure chance. What follows is a recounting of my father's passing, and the day of his funeral. I published shortly after it happened, fresh in my mind, elsewhere on the internet, and realized this should live here, on my own website. It's an intimate look at a Muslim funeral in Malaysia, and while I'd been to a few during my teenage years in Kuala Lumpur, this was a first, and even for my immediate family, it was an eye-opening and revelatory experience. I had awoken at 2:15am, anxious, knowing. My phone vibrated at 2:30am, missed it. I called my mom, knowing. My father had passed away. On Father’s Day. June 18, 2017. We gathered at the house at 7:30am later that...
over a year ago

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More from Naz Hamid — Journal + Links

✏️ Tag, you're it

Tagged by Scott and Luke and in thoughtful return, I’m answering the Blog Questions Challenge here. Some of these answers may overlap with the answers I gave Manu for his People & Blogs series, so I’ll do my best to do something a bit different. Please visit Manu’s P&B site though, and read through many of the excellent interviews there. Much credit to Bear Blog for these questions. Why did you start blogging in the first place? I noted how I appreciated the early bloggers, in particular from the Pyra Labs/Blogger crew, but to go back even further, I was fond of journaling early. Much of that was in the form of drawings as a child, then coupled with text. It wasn’t until I read about how musicians like Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam would keep copious journals, and in particular, Henry Rollins’ Get In The Van, showed me that documenting your life was important as a record of a lived person. Rollins would later read from these journals early in his transition from full-time musician to spoken word artist, and the storytelling inspired me. Since I was online, and web design had captivated me, it all came together. What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it? I’m currently using the lovely static site generator, Eleventy (11ty). It pushes to a GitHub repository, which triggers a deploy to Netlify. After using so many different platforms over the decades, with my posts and data semi-locked in MySQL databases, the idea of a fast, file-first, SSG was the way I absolutely wanted to go when I started blogging at this domain. Steph Ango’s File Over App is a thoughtful read on data portability. Have you blogged on other platforms before? As mentioned just before this, yes. I started with Geocities, Livejournal, tried Greymatter, then Movable Type was the first to make it all click. I got really comfortable and pushed that system far — Gapers Block was the most involved version that I had done with multiple blogs running under one instance with different layouts and sections and includes all over the place. Dean Allen’s (RIP) Textpattern stole my heart away for many years after MT got acquired, and then I stopped blogging when Weightshift became my focus, and social media started to bloom. Weightshift used various CMSs for clients: MT, TXP, ExpressionEngine, CraftCMS, Wordpress, etc. I toyed with Tumblr, and other things, but eventually restarted with Jekyll, but quickly switched to 11ty. How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog? Most everything starts in Bear. I have a master note of ideas, that links out to other notes and I keep adding new ones, revisit others, and check off published ones. When do you feel most inspired to write? Whenever an idea strikes. This can happen at any time and drafts are started anywhere. I generally publish in the evening though. Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft? I used to be more immediate with my publishing decades ago, adhering to a near daily schedule. These days, some thought and care goes into each post, and if possible, I like to add a touch of flavor to a post, like the rotated album covers for the Music in 2024 post. What are you generally interested in writing about? How we as humans live in a world ever-changing because of technological influence and society’s adoption and adaptation to it. I love travel so posts about cultures and countries, as well as overlanding and camping domestically. And personal things that are more feeling the feels. Who are you writing for? Myself first, but through a lens of, “this information or thought could help someone else, and/or I’d love to share a different perspective that’s unique to me.” What’s your favorite post on your blog? 2023 in the Rearview is a big one, and I worked on that for a while. Taken for a Ride is a good one I think about taking a Waymo autonomous vehicle for the first time, but I like the sort of pieces that come from a more emotional and resilient place, like Let This Be a Moment, that allow me to work through things. Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature? I’m very content with 11ty. I’m constantly evolving and refactoring the design and code where I can see improvement. This is a lovely mode to be in: it’s iterative like software development than constantly new like marketing. As for features: a work section (underway), and better ways to showcase my photography, which is a longtime interest and activity for me. Tag ‘em. I’m going to tag Bix, Ethan, Gosha, Grant, Matt, Piper, Rachel, Simon, Susan, Thu, and Winnie. Read on nazhamid.com or Reply via email

6 months ago 59 votes
🔗 Be A Property Owner And Not A Renter On The Internet

We are tenants with landlords who want to make sure that we can’t leave the building or go hang out with friends elsewhere, all while showing us how happy we should be with the limitations imposed on us. — Den Delimarsky A long, weighty one, but very worth the read. Visit original link → or View on nazhamid.com →

7 months ago 42 votes
🔗 SEEN, READ 2024

01/05 PREDATORS, AMERICAN GREED — Steven Soderbergh Director Steven Soderbergh's media recap of 2024. It's fascinating to see how many movies he watched multiple times, and the reverse watch of the original Star Wars trilogy. Phantom of the Menace twice too? Visit original link → or View on nazhamid.com →

7 months ago 43 votes
🔗 Media Recap 2024

I’m including the most memorable, impactful, or beloved works of—creative genius, or something, that I’ve encountered this year. I’m not a critic; I am mostly just talking about things I liked. These are tremendous to me. I hope they can be tremendous to you, too. — Anh The list is great, but this one is also visually gorgeous. Best experienced in a browser near you. Visit original link → or View on nazhamid.com →

7 months ago 34 votes
🔗 Future Web

It’s idealistic and very millennial of me to reminiscence the early days of Web innocence, unbound creativity it hosted and wonderful lack of monetisation of virtually every aspect of being online. We can’t turn back time. But, individually and collectively, we can strive for better as the Web evolves as a home for work, knowledge, community, and love. We can resist the ongoing enshittification and corporate capitalism. So I jotted down an non-exhaustive list of what I’d love the future Web to be. — Karolina Szczur A great list. Visit original link → or View on nazhamid.com →

7 months ago 38 votes

More in literature

Decoding the Mystery of Intuition: Pioneering Philosopher of AI Margaret Boden on the Three Elements of Creativity

“The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do [only] whatever we know how to order it to perform,” Ada Lovelace inveighed upon composing the world’s first algorithm for the world’s first computer. Meanwhile, she was reckoning with the nature of creativity, distilling it to a trinity: “an intuitive perception of hidden things,” “immense reasoning faculties,” and the “concentrative faculty” of bringing to any creative endeavor “a vast apparatus from all sorts of apparently irrelevant and extraneous sources” — that is, intuition, the analytical prowess to evaluate the fruits of intuition, and a rich reservoir of… read article

9 hours ago 2 votes
Marginalia: How to run the world, the case against elections, unions championing WFH

Notes from the margins of my research.

20 hours ago 2 votes
'Essayists, Like Poets, Are Born and Not Made'

“A knowledge of men and of books is also to be desired; for it is a writer’s best reason of being, and without it he does well to hold his tongue. Blessed with these attributes he is an essayist to some purpose. Give him leisure and occasion, and his discourse may well become as popular as Montaigne’s own.” If pressed to name my favorite literary form I would choose the essay, the form without a strict form, seemingly designed for free spirits with brains and emotional depth – “a knowledge of men and of books,” as W.E. Henley puts it above. The most unlikely things can be successful essays – reviews, memoirs, scientific papers, recipes, fiction. The best ones have a point, even an argument or lesson, but never hector or harangue the reader. An essayist confides. Without condescending, he puts his arm around your shoulder and talks softly, turning you into the sole member of his audience, a person worthy of his trust.   Sure, Montaigne started it all (except for Plutarch and Seneca), but the English came to perfect it – Johnson, Hazlitt, Lamb, Stevenson, Chesterton, Beerbohm and the rest. William Ernest Henley (1849-1903) will never be a member of that front rank. He was a poet, lauded in his day, and will always be remembered for a poem my eighth-grade English teacher had us memorize sixty years ago: "Invictus." It’s a natural for recitation, up there with Kipling.   The passage at the top is taken from Henley’s “Essays and Essayists” collected in Views and Reviews: Essays in Appreciation (1892).He writes:   “Essayists, like poets, are born and not made, and for one worth remembering the world is confronted with a hundred not worth reading. Your true essayist is in a literary sense the friend of everybody. As one of the brotherhood has phrased it, it is his function ‘to speak with ease and opportunity to all men.’ He must be personal, or his hearers can feel no manner of interest in him. He must be candid and sincere, or his readers presently see through him. He must have learned to think for himself and to consider his surroundings with an eye that is both kindly and observant, or they straightway find his company unprofitable.”   Henley was born on this date, August 23, in 1849. His friend Stevenson, who based the character of Long John Silver in Treasure Island (1883) on the one-legged Henley, wrote him a letter from Nebraska on August 23, 1879 -- the poet's thirtieth birthday. Stevenson writes a brief, impromptu essay from Willa Cather's (b. 1873) future turf:   “I am sitting on the top of the cars with a mill party from Missouri going west for his health. Desolate flat prairie upon all hands. Here and there a herd of cattle, a yellow butterfly or two; a patch of wild sunflowers; a wooden house or two; then a wooden church alone in miles of waste; then a windmill to pump water. When we stop, which we do often, for emigrants and freight travel together, the kine first, the men after, the whole plain is heard singing with cicadae.”

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The Patient Penelope Fitzgerald

Here’s to the English writer who waited until her ninth decade to finally experience fame in America The post The Patient Penelope Fitzgerald appeared first on The American Scholar.

yesterday 3 votes
Orcas and the Price of Consciousness: Lessons in Love and Loss from Earth’s Most Successful Predator

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